Word: karbala
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sunnis, who constitute about three quarters of the world's Muslims today - and instead followed a series of 12 imams who were direct descendants of Muhammad. The schism originated as a violent power struggle, with both Ali and Hussein murdered by rivals. The latter, killed at the battle of Karbala in Iraq, came to symbolize the cult of martyrdom in the Shiite tradition, with followers still today flagellating themselves during the annual Ashura festival for their failure to rally to Hussein and prevent his death...
...passionate displays of Iraqi freedom after U.S.-led troops toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in the spring of 2003. Saddam had banned the holiday, which commemorates the battlefield death of Muhammad's grandson Hussein in A.D. 680. But tens of thousands of pilgrims suddenly appeared in the streets of Karbala after the coalition troops swept through, scourging themselves bloody in the traditional attempt to replicate the pain of Hussein's death. In 2004 and 2005, a different sort of pain was imposed, by terrorists-most probably the followers of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi-who launched...
...Ashura was just a fluke; there was plenty of violence elsewhere in Iraq last week. Insurgent attacks-about 70 a day-are significantly higher than they were last year. But there are curious patterns to the violence, which may have something to do with the absence of carnage in Karbala. Last summer al-Zarqawi apparently received a letter-later released by the U.S. government-from the al-Qaeda leadership ordering him to stop bombing Islamic innocents. Recently al-Zarqawi's terrorists seem to have found a new preoccupation: assassinating Sunni leaders who are planning to participate in the new Iraqi...
...palaces. But al-Jaafari knew not to make himself too comfortable. Boxes are backed up in the corner of his office, never unpacked. Framed pictures lean against the wall, unlikely to be hung. He often recalls a discussion he had as a young student in the holy city of Karbala, when he told a friend of his ambition to launch an opposition movement. The friend stopped him and warned that managing Iraq would be much harder than getting to power. "He was right about this," al-Jaafari says. A lesson the next Prime Minister should note...
...because of a new crop of instructors, tested by recent combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, who have come back to teach cadets about the moral ambiguities and psychological rigors of counterinsurgency and nation building. Captain Chris McKinney led a company of a hundred men through the bloody strike on Karbala before teaching infantry tactics, and the importance of constant, fierce adherence to Army standards, to West Point cadets. Major Jason Amerine, a Special Forces officer who fought alongside now-President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, uses his international relations class to shake his cadets out of any comfortable misconceptions about...